


Echoes of Who You Once Were

by NinjaAtticus



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Amnesia, Clones, Doing a great job, Identity Issues, me earlier: what if i wrote angsty parker amnesia fic... jk unless??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:21:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27517525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NinjaAtticus/pseuds/NinjaAtticus
Summary: When he wakes up out of the darkness Parker Macmillan IIII has no idea who he is. The Coin gives him a purpose - to do a great job. And yet he knows there is something missing, the emptiness still inside him, the strange looks from his friends, the number at the end of his name.
Comments: 20
Kudos: 24





	Echoes of Who You Once Were

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this at 1am in one sitting so don't expect literature lol. Anyway, parker death messed me up more than i was expecting and then i started thinking about the inherent conceptual coolness of amnesia clones and before i knew it this appeared. Also sibr as an entity is in this and I apologize in advance if any sibr people happen to read this, I don't think this counts as rpf but it is slightly sus lmao.
> 
> Edit: So this didn't age well lol

For a moment, when he wakes, he doesn’t know who he is. There’s a strange emptiness inside him that he is just aware enough of to realise feels wrong, an aching yearning for something just out of reach. But he does know this: he is inside something, something solid and dark. He cannot see his hands or feet but he knows that he must have them, he can feel them, the only company in this barren void. He’s not sure how long he waits in the dark. How many seconds, months, days until the void starts to crack open, light streaming in through growing faults in his inescapable cage. He blinks against the light, strange and alien, but recognizable too and he sees a face appear on the outside, a strange tall woman glowing gold.

* * *

They take him out of the darkness and into an office. The strange gold woman sits on the other side of a desk and surveys him with critical eyes, her gaze seeming to pierce every inch of him, analyzing him for errors. He shuffles in his seat and straightens his tie, the red piece of fabric he had awoken wearing, that seems to constrict around his neck.

“Do you know who I am?” The woman says and her voice is cruel and cold but beautiful too, almost deific. He shakes his head slowly. He has never seen her before. He has never seen anyone else before.

“Good.” She starts to smile slightly and he is too busy being entranced to feel scared. “I am the Coin. I am your Boss. And you will do as I say.”

He nods frantically. He will do whatever the Coin says, he knows this, an impulse baked into him as natural as breathing. She pauses and every moment feels tangible.

“Do you know who you are?” The Coin asks finally.

“No.” He says and his voice sounds so strange to him in the silent room. And it is the truth, he does not know, the emptiness is still unfilled. But he realises suddenly that he wants to know, needs to know, that maybe if he does then everything will make sense.

She sighs and he hates to think that he has disappointed her. “You are Intern-Interim Commissioner Parker Macmillan IIII. You will do a great job.”

“Intern-Interim…” The words feel heavy on his tongue as though they’re not sure they should belong to him. The Coin sighs and looks at him as though she is doing him a massive favour.

“Parker.” She says and Parker looks up at that one and stops fiddling with his tie as his breath catches. Parker. That’s his name, he knows that’s his name. For the first time Parker starts to feel a little bit like a person, not some strange entity coughed up by an egg.

“Thank you.” He says because he is thankful, so grateful that she has given him this thread to hold onto. She nods dismissively and stands, walking briskly out the room, eyes already focused on something grander than him.

“Don’t mess it up.” Coin says as she leaves the room. And under her breath, once she knows Parker can’t hear she whispers -“Not again.”

* * *

The job is a little overwhelming to say the least. Parker knows that he has to do Commissioner things, or Intern-Interim Commissioner things he supposes, but he’s not entirely sure what the job of being ‘Commissioner’ actually involves. His one directive is to ‘do a great job’ which, really, could mean anything. There aren’t many clues in the office, or rather there are so many that is goes right back to being confusing. He wants to learn though, to fill his strange empty life with something.

* * *

On the second day, which Parker spends trying and failing to figure out what his job actually entails, there is a knock at the door. Parker sits up promptly, straightens his tie and fiddles with his glasses. He wants to look at least a little bit competent.

“What.” He says and then winces because it sounded a little bit rude and he had not intended it to. The door creaks open and a worried looking person who is definitely not the Coin stands awkwardly in the hallway, sheets of graph paper scrunched up in their white-knuckled hand.

“Um.” Parker says which is an entirely inadequate response because the person looks like they have been crying, he can see their red-rimmed eyes under multiple pairs of glasses.

“Hi.” They say, stepping into the office and putting the sheet of paper down on his important looking desk. “That’s the err… math for today. You know, the stats and stuff.”

“What?” He says and then curses himself again. This person is crying and all he can think to say is ‘what’. They are looking at him like they know him but Parker knows he has never seen them before. He can count the people he’s met on one finger.

“Sorry.” They say, fiddling with the bottom of their coolmathgames.com t-shirt. “We should really introduce ourselves, we’re SIBR. Society for Internet Blaseball Research that is.”

SIBR holds out a hand and Parker takes it, trying to do a good firm handshake, not a boring one, but as this is his first try he doesn’t do a very good job.

“I hope we can be friends.” Parker says which has the complete opposite effect of what he intended as SIBR pales and looks at Parker with wide eyes. He shuffles back a little in his chair.

“You look just like him.” They say in a voice that’s almost a whisper and Parker tilts his head to the side in puzzlement.

“Huh?” He does not know what these strange math people are talking about.

“Sorry, it’s not your fault.” They say and Parker feels more lost than ever before. “We’d love to be friends.”

Parker smiles a little in spite of himself. He has never had a friend before. And SIBR seems nice even if they do like math.

“Maybe we should go get ice cream?” SIBR says suddenly and Parker beams.

“Okay.”

The ice cream is delicious.

* * *

Slowly but surely Parker starts to get the hang of his job. People are saying that he is doing a great job so he hopes the Coin is happy. There are a few bumps along the road of course, like the whole mess with Photoshop, but SIBR helps and the notes around the office start to make some sort of sense. Every day is more or less the same. He wakes up when Sun 2 rises, gets out of his bed under the desk and works until night time. Food happens in between and sometimes SIBR comes round to chat. He watches the Blaseball news every evening. Life is good and unconfusing. Until he drops his pen in the trash can and roots around to find it. Until he finds the photos right at the bottom.

They are photos of him. Him with SIBR and the news presenter and the Coin, him at blaseball games, one where he’s wearing a different outfit that he definitely doesn’t own. The person in the photos is Parker and yet they are not. They have the same generic office worker look to them, the glasses and the slightly curly brown hair and the same grey eyes. Parker is smiling in the photos. Except for the one with the Coin. Maybe he has a twin. People have twins. But then wouldn’t they have been born together? Exited that egg bleary eyed and lost side by side? Parker is struck with a strange sense of dread. He knows his name is Parker Macmillan IIII. This is the first time it’s bothered him.

* * *

That night he dreams of burning.

* * *

“Do I have a brother?” Parker asks the next time he gets ice cream with SIBR, trying to be casual as he stirs his spoon in the moose track ice cream he ordered. SIBR shuffles uncomfortably in their seat.

“No.” They say but it’s more loaded than Parker would like to admit. “Why do you think that?”

They eye him with a sense of suspicion that makes Parker feel vaguely uncomfortable. He goes back to chewing his ice cream for far longer than is necessary.

“I don’t know.” He says finally and SIBR sighs, looking almost disappointed.

“Do you remember before?” They ask suddenly in a small, quiet voice and Parker looks up to meet their eyes. SIBR is crying and for a moment Parker wants to too.

“What?” He replies and SIBR turn away, the moment lost before it ever really started.

“It doesn’t matter.” SIBR says. But it does.

* * *

Parker can’t go to sleep that night, lying on the pull-up bed under his desk. Remember? Remember what! It had just been darkness before. There was hardly a before to remember. He feels stupid; like there’s something fundamental he doesn’t understand. Parker takes off his glasses to pinch his nose, not that his glasses do anything anyway, his eyesight is just the same without them. He needs to know something. But he doesn’t know what. He looks up and sees something he hadn’t noticed before, ridges under the table, thick grooves cut into the wood. Parker reaches up to touch them reverently, a shoddily drawn blaseball, a peanut, for some reason. Who had drawn these? Had they slept here too? And then, in the corner of the underside of the desk, another carving. PM. Parker stares up at it like it holds all the answers. Maybe it does. A moment more and then Parker sits up sharply, banging his head on the wood in the process.

“Ow.” He whispers to nobody as he crawls out from under his desk, scrambling on the top and heaving himself up. Parker breathes deeply, looks around the dark shadowy office. It’s almost scary, the filing cabinets looming like monoliths. He leaves his glasses in the bed and shrugs off the tie he’s still wearing before tiptoeing slowly to the door. He needs to know what’s out there. He needs to see where he was born. Maybe then he can finally figure out who he is, maybe even who he was.

Parker is half-expecting the door to be locked but it opens slowly and Parker slips out, trying to avoid tripping on the potted plant outside the door. He thinks back to that first day, weeks ago now, trying to remember the route they had taken through the headquarters when he had been mostly too out of it to comprehend his surroundings. Parker thinks it’s left though so he goes with his instincts and turns left, padding down the dark corridor, trying, and failing, not to be scared.

* * *

Finally he arrives at a door. It is old and important looking and Parker can feel something beyond it. He knows this is the place where he hatched. He pushes open the door and steps in.

A circle of eggs surround the room, a faint blue light radiating from their shells. The darkness was in there, Parker thinks as he crosses the strange sigils painted across the floor, lines reaching out into the base of the eggs. He heads for the fourth egg, which, like the first three, is cracked. He remembers that empty void, what it had felt like to be trapped in there, that place where time held no meaning. The first three have hatched too. Parker has a horrible, sinking feeling what was in those eggs. What still is in the other ones.

“Commissioner.” An eerie voice calls out from the doorway and Parker turns to see her, the Coin, majestic and shining with terrible beauty in the darkness.

“Oh no.” Parker whispers. She could kill him with a snap of her fingers, so great is her power.

“So you’ve figured out the truth. How unfortunate.” She looks at the cracked eggs with distaste. “I really thought I would get it right this time. Parker III’s termination was not planned but I was so excited to start fresh with you.”

Parker feels like he can’t breathe. He looks at the gold of the Coin and all he sees is fire.

“What?” He says, feeling lost, nearly as lost as the first day, before she gave him his purpose.

“You are not my first try Parker. And you won’t be my last. The first one was unfortunately rebellious; he tried to escape so I killed him. I overcorrected with Parker II. No personality. Nothing. I doubt he even noticed dying. Parker III was nearly perfect, but he so badly wanted to be everyone’s best friend. It was an unacceptable weakness. Luckily Sunman took care of that when they incinerated him. And now we have you. Who is just a little bit too curious for his own good.”

Parker wants to throw up but he’s not sure if his strange perfect clone body even knows how to do that. He pictures the other Parkers sleeping under his desk in their little bed, so like him and yet so different, dreaming their own dreams. He thinks of Parker I who longed to be out in the sun, still the first sun back then, who had felt that something was wrong, of Parker II empty and confused and alone, of Parker III, chatting with SIBR over coffee, feeling so proud of himself whenever the fans called him their best friend. He remembers the pain, that fleeting indescribable agony when they had set him on fire.

“What?” Parker says as the visions come and go, his voice breaking and scared.

“You remember then?” Coin says with a sense of deep disappointment. “It always happens eventually but the others never managed to piece it together. You all come from the same source; I suppose there is some cross-contamination to be expected.”

Her voice is cold, so cold, and Parker doesn’t know what to do. He wants to do a great job. But he’s not sure if the Coin will let him do that anymore. She lifts up a hand and it starts to glow.

“Wait!” Parker says and at almost the same time a voice yells “Stop!”

The Coin’s glow fades and Parker sees SIBR standing at the door holding math paraphernalia. Parker looks into their eyes and feels himself crying. He remembers vaguely, when he was not himself, being their best friend. He will not get the chance to this time.

“You can’t just kill another Parker!” SIBR says, voice angry, looking fierce despite the math pun pajamas they are wearing. “The fans will riot. You saw what happened when Parker III died. If they lose another Commissioner… well, they’ve killed a God before.”

The Coin stares SIBR down but the math conglomerate does not move. Parker feels so eternally grateful.

“He’ll misbehave.” Coin says still looking at SIBR. “He won’t do a great job.”

“I will.” Parker says, trying to feel brave. “You made me to do a great job and I want to do that. I want to be good enough so that they can call me their best friend.”

And in that moment Parker no longer feels empty. He knows without a doubt what he has been sent to do. He has a purpose!

The Coin surveys him for a moment and then nods and Parker feels a sudden surge of happiness, he gets to live, at least for a little while longer. The Coin turns away and Parker grins.

“Nice.” He says and SIBR looks over at him.

“So you remember?” They ask with hope in their eyes. “Being Parker III?”

Parker thinks for a moment, tries not to feel that burning pain, focuses on happier times.

“A little bit.” He says and SIBR looks disappointed. “I’m not him, not really. Just like he wasn’t the one before him. But I know he did a great job.”

SIBR laughs under their breath and smiles softly.

“We used to say that like a joke. But it was never a joke really. Parker did a great job. And I’m sure you will too.”

Parker IIII smiles. He will.

**Author's Note:**

> kudos and comments always appreciated, i love recieving serotonin :)


End file.
